Traditional Concepts Driving 3D Rigging Ideas

Here’s a couple short must-see CG demos by animator Bernhard Haux. In the first video, Haux incorporates a dynamic wave principle into his CG rig. In the second video, Haux creates a tool to help make his CG poses cartoonier and more appealing. Animator Keith Lango calls this “a very cool screen space mesh deformer that lets you sculpt the geometry based on the image plane, not just with deformer nodes in the rig.”

It’s always exciting to see artists pushing CG beyond its default mode, not because I want to see CG mimic hand-drawn animation, but because adding the flexibility of drawn animation to CG will only help push the technique forward and allow it to go places we can’t even imagine yet. I’m not sure whether the second tool already exists in the major studios like Pixar and DreamWorks though I assume it’s available to animators in one form or another. What I do know is that the average piece of non-big budget commercial CG could greatly benefit from an easy-to-use tool like this which allows animators to sculpt their poses.